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WORK TITLE: Dragon’s Trail
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: http://josephmalik.com/
CITY:
STATE:
COUNTRY: United States
NATIONALITY: American
http://josephmalik.com/blog/ lives in the Pacific Northwest currently mobilized in the Army Reserve
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Married.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer, computational linguist, touring rock musician, stuntman.
MIILITARY:Soldier in the United States Special Operations Command; veteran of Operation Enduring Freedom; U.S. Army Reserve.
WRITINGS
SIDELIGHTS
Joseph Malik writes fantasy fiction and is an eligible author for the 2018 John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer in Science Fiction/Fantasy. Serving in the U.S. military, he was in the United States Special Operations Command and is a veteran of Operation Enduring Freedom. He has lectured on advanced intelligence theory and asymmetric warfare for the U.S. military and has worked as a computational linguist and a stuntman.
In 2017, Malik published Dragon’s Trail, the first book in the “Outworlders” series, which follows a washed up but still effective expert in medieval weaponry and sword fighting. Once an Olympic hopeful, Jarrod Torrealday accidentally killed an opponent and was banned from the games. Now he’s an alcoholic reduced to working as a stuntman and consultant in fantasy movies. One day he’s asked to travel to the fantasy land of Gateskeep, populated with creatures from mythology, to work as a swordsman and war counselor for a sorcerer in their war. Torrealday accepts and brings along his friend who is also skilled in various killing tools. “Despite a slow start, the action, humor, and intrigue quickly build, showcasing Jarrod as James Bond in tarnished armor,” according to a Publishers Weekly writer.
Although Torrealday doesn’t use magic, he relies on battle strategy and combat techniques, making the book a blend of technothriller and military fantasy. Malik adds his own knowledge of metallurgy, weapons, weaponsmithing, and battlefield tactics. In an interview online at Yudhanjaya, Malik described to Yudhanjaya Wijeratne the choice of blending these traits into a novel: “I think there’s a natural crossover between fantasy and thrillers, or there can be.” He cited books like The Marathon Man, The Princess Bride, and The Name of the Rose. As for thrillers like The Hunt for Red October, Malik added: “to my knowledge, nobody had taken that kind of approach with fantasy—that level of research and narrative explanation—and I wanted to read something like that, so I decided to write it.”
Praising Malik for attention to detail, a writer online at Long and Short Reviews said: “Absolutely everything, the fights, weaponry, people, animals, weather, etc., is described meticulously making this strange new world feel very concrete and realistic. Consequently, I feel that this is not a book to race through. It is a book to savor and soak in all the details.” On the FrustratedEgo Stories website, Stephan Morse said: “General narrative is a bit weaker. The story itself certainly contains magic which is always a draw. I loved the clash between modern and alternate world situations.” Morse added that the story was entertaining all the way through the book, and that Malik seemed to have done much research about different weaponry.
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Publishers Weekly, November. 20, 2017, review of Dragon’s Tail, p. 79.
ONLINE
FrustratedEgo Stories, https://frustratedego.com/ (April 1, 2018), Stephan Mores, review of Dragon’s Tail.
Joseph Malik Website, http://josephmalik.com (April 1, 2018), author profile.
Yudhanjaya, http://yudhanjaya.com/ (March 1, 2017), Yudhanjaya Wijeratne, review of Dragon’s Tail.
Joseph Malik is an eligible author for the 2018 John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer in Science Fiction/Fantasy. In addition to fiction, he writes and lectures on advanced intelligence theory and asymmetric warfare for the U.S. military. He has worked as a stuntman, a high-rise window washer, a computational linguist, a touring rock musician, and a soldier in the United States Special Operations Command. A veteran of Operation Enduring Freedom, he lives in the Pacific Northwest along with his wife and their two dogs.
Dragon’s Trail is his first novel. A sequel, The New Magic, is scheduled for late summer 2018. Visit josephmalik.com to sign up for e-mail updates about future releases.
Joseph Malik is an eligible author for the 2018 John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer in Science Fiction/Fantasy. In addition to fiction, he writes and lectures on advanced intelligence theory and asymmetric warfare for the U.S. military. He has worked as a stuntman, a high-rise window washer, a computational linguist, a touring rock musician, and a soldier in the United States Special Operations Command. A veteran of Operation Enduring Freedom, he lives in the Pacific Northwest along with his wife and their two dogs. Mr. Malik is currently mobilized in the U.S. Army Reserve.
Dragon’s Trail is his first novel. A sequel, The New Magic, is nearing completion.
An interview is now up on the blog, along with a Veterans Day 2017 radio interview.
For a media kit, please use the contact form, below.
A press release is available through this link.
Find him @jmalikauthor on Facebook and Twitter.
JOSEPH MALIK (INTERVIEW) – DRAGON’S TRAIL AND THE ART OF WRITING REALISTIC FANTASY
Posted on MARCH 1, 2017 by YUDHANJAYA WIJERATNE
There’s a new book I’ve been reading – Dragon’s Trail, a debut fantasy novel by Joseph Malik. The best way I can describe it is as a modern Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court: a modern-day man with some very select skills and equipment ends up making a massive dent in a very old world.
DT’s hero, Jarrod, is armed not with a magic sword or powers, but with modern steel, modern strategies for battle analysis, and a lifetime of combat training from the professional sword fighting / Live-Action Role-Play circles. He’s dropped smack into a medieval fantasy world, with everyone under the assumption that he’s some kind of demon, and given a mission: the enemy is kicking ass under the leadership of a sorcerer who once was a Las Vegas showhand. Jarrod, supposed demon and savior, is supposed to figure out how to deal with this threat.
What really shines through here is the author’s love of realism, even in fantasy scenarios (read his blogpost here about steel in medieval warfare to understand what I mean). Joe Malik, a huge geek who happens to be a former Special Ops guy, apparently intends this to be part one of a bigger discussion – information asymmetry in warfare, modern weapons and the power advantages they give, and how technological progress plays into battle strategy at every level – and it works right from the start.
After reading some of his blogposts, I asked for an email Q&A, and he was kind enough to provide some very lengthy answers. Read ‘Talking Tech In Fantasy’, a conversation he has with one of his beta readers, and skip back here to build on what they discussed there.
Dragon’s Trail looks like a hit. You mentioned you’d been writing this for thirty years, to the point where it wasn’t about words anymore. How do you measure progress on your work? Is there a metric you use, like x number of drafts?
JM: I don’t know if “hit” is the right word, but I’m extremely pleased. It has been generating steady sales, a “slow burn,” for about six months, now, and doing quite well considering it’s a debut release on a small press. Last week it had a great review posted to GoodReads, and all I can figure is that the reviewer has a huge social reach, because sales took off on the same day. It peaked at #18 in Military Fantasy last week, shoulder to shoulder with such luminaries as Tad Williams and Joe Abercrombie, and was briefly under the 10,000 mark overall on Amazon. It was a small but significant proof of concept.
As for thirty years writing this, it has been, and it hasn’t. I started writing this story back in high school, in the mid-80’s. Granted, it’s gone through a lot of changes and I sucked back then. I still have the original manuscript, with comments and corrections from my high school English teacher. I pursued the story as a hobby for a few years, and then got serious about writing in college, and started submitting the novel in probably the mid-1990’s. Rejections led to rewrites in an endless circle for about ten years, and the story developed and I started working on series ideas. Toward the end of that, I quit submitting and just wrote for my own enjoyment. Then I put it away for about five years and pretty much forgot about it, and then rediscovered it five years ago and started a total rewrite. That book became Dragon’s Trail.
I don’t know how I measure progress anymore. My style is defined at this point; I have my voice. Fifteen years of cover to cover rewrites will do that to you. So, I have a standard, but it’s nebulous. You reach a point with your rewrites where you’re like a standup comic rehearsing in front of a mirror, getting the timing and phrasing right. You need to know how the story goes, but then you have to figure out how to tell it so that you can make it engaging. I’m on my first rewrite of Book II, The New Magic, right now, and I can tell that this version is going to hit pretty close to the mark. It’s progressing quickly. I think that ultimately, my editor, Monique Fischer, will be the judge of whether or not it’s ready. Really, my metric — if I have one — is how confident I feel presenting this to my editor.
DT has a ton of information on metallurgy, weapons, weaponsmithing, not to mention battlefield tactics, but spread out like a thriller – as opposed to, say, the info-dumps you commonly see in most scifi and fantasy. How did you work out this style?
JM: Thanks.
First off, I need to shout out to Monique again on this one. My readers tell me that there’s really no other book like Dragon’s Trail out there right now, at least, to hear them tell it. It’s just a different kind of book, that’s trying to do something new with the genre, and maybe even create its own. I went to a few different editors with the manuscript, and one of them said, even at the pitch, that he wouldn’t touch it. One, who I started working with after he did a killer sample edit, wanted a total rewrite in limited third POV and wanted me to change the characters so that it would “resonate with the YA crowd.” He also wanted all the technical stuff taken out and for me to just give Jarrod a magic sword. So that didn’t work out. When I approached Monique and told her that I had a cross-worlds, epic fantasy, political technothriller written for an adult audience and voiced in old-school omniscient, she said, “Sounds great.” She was critical in toning it down in spots and raising the volume in others. She gets it.
For my part, I read a lot of technothrillers. I read more thrillers than I do fantasy, and I love the geeky stuff. The geekier, the better. In fact, I have a section of bookshelf that’s nothing but repair and operation manuals for antique equipment: turn-of-the-century power drills, vacuum cleaner repair manuals from the ’40’s. I love arcana.
I think there’s a natural crossover between fantasy and thrillers, or there can be. The author of The Marathon Man, William Goldman, is also the author of The Princess Bride. Umberto Eco wrote both Foucault’s Pendulum, which is just freaking mind-bending, but also wrote The Name of the Rose, which is an amazing historical thriller. I actually started writing fantasy all those years ago because I’d read The Hunt for Red October and Red Storm Rising. And to my knowledge, nobody had taken that kind of approach with fantasy — that level of research and narrative explanation — and I wanted to read something like that, so I decided to write it. Goldman kind of went there with the fencing and the worldbuilding in The Princess Bride, which also has that omniscient narrative feel that I love so much; it’s written from the POV of someone who’s telling you the story, which is just magnificent to me.
Anyway, with the fantasy that I’d been reading as a kid, it seemed to me that many authors were getting their details wrong. It seemed to make sense to me to research all of it, and take the thriller-writer’s approach: have the characters be the experts, and have the reader see it through their eyes. Tom Clancy and Michael Crichton, who my work keeps getting compared to, were masters of this. Infodumps can be entertaining if you tell them as stories in their own right, and I think that’s where sci-fi and fantasy authors screw it up. You can’t just start into the, “Well, as you know, George . . .” There’s an art to it; a finesse. Eric van Lustbader does such an amazing job with the Eastern mindset without ever ramming it down your throat. He just sets you down in the middle of it and folds the world up around you. James Clavell did a wonderful fish-out-of-water thing with Shogun by making the main character a student for a good part of it. Again, though: thrillers, and historical thrillers. Not so much in fantasy, which is weird, because it’s not much of a leap.
Doing the homework for all this, or at least realizing that I’d have to, led me to my approach to research, which is strictly hands-on. It started with foil and saber lessons after school through the local community college. Then I bought an old sword in an antique store, and made a shirt of mail from coat hanger wire, and started whacking at it and shooting arrows at it and making notes. I got hooked on learning how things should work in fantasy; I didn’t realize it would become a lifelong quest. Pretty much, at this point, though, if my characters do it, I’ve likely done it, myself. It’s easy enough to go on YouTube or Wikipedia and research how something functions (at least now; that wasn’t an option when I started all this) but when you learn how to do it yourself, the act of learning and doing creates its own story. All these little stories funnel up into the book like roots, which solidifies the worldbuilding. I think that’s why words like “convincing” and “plausible” keep coming up in reviews for Dragon’s Trail.
This kind of research is much more of a thriller concept, I think, than a fantasy one. In thrillers, you expect the technical details to be right. In fantasy, you expect the details to be the same as every other fantasy book, instead of being right. There are accepted inaccuracies embedded in the tropes, and I sometimes read fantasy just to find these things so I can go out and test them and blow them up. You see that a lot in Dragon’s Trail; you think you know how it’s going to go because you’ve seen this a hundred times, but it turns out that the trope is wrong, and it really works like this. The scene where Jarrod draws the wrong sword against the sheth, and the sword he needs is on his horse. You’d think, from the messages I get about that, that nobody in the history of fantasy has ever pointed out what different swords do. The hero’s sword is the hero’s sword, right? The hero draws his mighty sword and slays the critter. Well, maybe yes, maybe no. It depends on the sword. And the critter.
I can’t be the only person doing this. There have to be other authors out there doing it. Maybe together we’ll all set a new standard. A lot of hard fantasy writing seems to be wrapped up in the laws of the magic systems, which is awesome, but you still bump into these wild and sometimes laughable inaccuracies in the mundane parts of the worldbuilding. I believe that you have to get those mundane aspects right at the outset, because this develops a level of plausibility and trust with the reader that allows you to suspend disbelief sufficiently to introduce the magical aspects. By the time you get to the flying horses, hopefully the reader thinks, “Well, hell. He’s been right about everything else. Why not a flying horse?”
On that, it took weeks to design a functional pegasus saddle. But introducing it, I just write about the way the character’s legs fit into it and how much it hurts his trick knee, and that’s it. It’s, like, ten words out of a notepad’s worth of sketches and notes. It was originally a full page, down to the tooling and the latigo and the straps and the anatomy of the pegasus, since he had all this time up in the air to study it, but again, things like this come back down to my editor and her mighty red pen. She knew how to make it work. I didn’t.
What was the process of getting the book out there, once it was done? What did you have to do?
JM: The process was, I screwed it all up. I didn’t really think it through, and I didn’t do any research at all. The release of Dragon’s Trail was one of the dumbest things I’ve ever done.
I was of the impression that the indie market was for books like Dragon’s Trail; lifetime works that had been passed over by the major houses, and that the authors then decided to have professionally edited and released on their own dime. I completely misunderstood what the market was about, I’m afraid. I had no concept of pulps or writing to market or hitting the accepted tropes — hell, I’d written a book specifically destroying accepted tropes. I got laughed off of a couple of forums when I said that I had one book I’d been writing for thirty years.
After the initial friends-and-family spike at launch, I used the typical outlets for fantasy novels: BargainBooksy, Choosy Bookworm, ENT, taking an occasional chance on a Fiverr promotion, and playing with my Amazon marketing. I just took the money the book was bringing in and put it back into promo every month, and considered it all as a loss leader. What this did, unbeknownst to me, was keep the book afloat, and in so doing, it built up enough of a sales history that it appears to have some sticking power now that it has finally found its people. So, it’s successful by most definitions that indie authors throw around, but it’s not like I went out and bought a new Porsche.
I’ve been a panelist and moderator at NorWesCon, a sci-fi and fantasy convention in Seattle, for the past few years, and I think that’s what really kicked me in the ass to finish and publish. I didn’t even tell anyone I was an author all this time; I was invited to the con to speak and demonstrate as an expert on swordsmanship, hand-to-hand combat, and military strategy, plus all the stuff that I’ve learned while writing Dragon’s Trail. Panel after panel turned into “Fantasy Mythbusting,” with hand after hand going up and people asking why authors and directors never get this stuff right. People now follow me around from panel to panel every year, and it occurred to me that there’s a rabid, under-served readership out there who are sick of books and movies bullshitting them. If I’d really been smart about this, I’d have started an email list three years ago when I started speaking and demonstrating at cons. Huge, huge missed opportunity.
Your top ten for novels? (Note: I always try to ask this from people I come across. They’re generally a good indicator of what kind of mind the other person has).
JM: Only ten? Zoikes.
In no particular order:
Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon. 800 pages of impenetrable, backwards-talking, hyperintellectual brain-porn. A Tough Mudder course for your language center.
“It’s been a prevalent notion. Fallen sparks. Fragments of vessels broken at the Creation. And someday, somehow, before the end, a gathering back to home. A messenger from the Kingdom, arriving at the last moment. But I tell you there is no such message, no such home — only the millions of last moments . . . nothing more. Our history is an aggregate of last moments.”
Foucault’s Pendulum. The mother of all conspiracy theories.
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. No contest, the best writing of the late 20th Century. This is four books, but I’m counting it as one.
Discworld. Really, any of them.
The Martian. My favorite recent novel. A brilliant concept, a hilarious hero.
The Princess Bride.
The Hunt for Red October.
Jurassic Park. Not a particularly well-written novel; I think Crichton’s prose is clumsy and wooden in places. But the concept is genius, even if the science is (now known to be) flawed. What a fantastic piece of sci-fi.
Glory Road by Robert Heinlein. A masterpiece of crossworlds fantasy.
Point of Impact by Stephen Hunter. Another master of the technical thriller.
Thanks for this. I had fun.
Dragon's Trail: The Outworlders, Book 1
Publishers Weekly. 264.47 (Nov. 20, 2017): p79+.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
Dragon's Trail: The Outworlders, Book 1
Joseph Malik. Oxblood, $3.99 e-book (390p) ISBN 978-0-9978875-0-1
Malik's debut novel sparkles with a fresh take on some traditional epic fantasy tropes. Jarrod Torrealday is a disgraced Olympic-level fencer. Years ago, when he was at the top of his game, he accidentally killed a competitor and was consequently banned from the life he loved. He's survived since by teaching the art of the sword and consulting on stunts for films. When offered the opportunity to travel to the fantasy land of Gateskeep and assist with their upcoming war, he happily accepts, bringing along his friend Carter Sorenson, a greatsword expert, and as many of his "artisanal killing tools and works of 21st-century metallurgical genius" as he can carry. What follows is a deceptively simple and shockingly painful crash course in the politics of a world with Dark Ages--level technology. Despite a slow start, the action, humor, and intrigue quickly build, showcasing Jarrod as James Bond in tarnished armor. Detailed descriptions of equipment and tactics don't distract from the plot; rather, they add a layer of depth and dimension that carries the tale to the next level. This is a highly enjoyable story for fans of self-aware epic fantasy. (BookLife)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Dragon's Trail: The Outworlders, Book 1." Publishers Weekly, 20 Nov. 2017, p. 79+. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A517262111/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=75dee172. Accessed 16 Feb. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A517262111
Dragon’s Trail by Joseph Malik
51kksngzhl
Score: 5/5
Genre: Epic Fantasy
Synopsis:
“I didn’t come here to sell my soul. I came here to buy it back.”
Once dubbed “The Deadliest Man Alive,” Jarrod Torrealday is a former Olympic saber hopeful and medieval weapons expert banned from competition for killing another fencer in a duel. Despondent, volatile, alcoholic, yet still one of the greatest swordsmen alive, he now works for third-rate fantasy films as a technical consultant and stuntman.
When Jarrod accepts the gig of a lifetime from a sorcerer looking for a hero, he finds himself facing an invading army in a world inhabited by creatures from Earth’s mythical past. He soon learns that the enemy mastermind is also from Earth, and has laid the foundations for a new kind of war.
Review:
This review is a cautionary tale of ‘read the blurb’ (in a good way). Here’s what I assumed with the first few pages – a high fantasy novel with lords, sorcerers, demons. It all felt a bit standard. I’d admit, the character’s conversational banter is what drew me into this story and kept me going. The first bit felt fantastic. The third person narrative can be a bit full of short, choppy sentences that nearly lost me. Still, the conversation shines.
Then, after my initial impression of amusing banter – my brain perked up – there were suddenly cars. It was suddenly a ren faire. Somehow, the impression I’d received during the opening was straight up wrong and I loved it. We were just talking about demon armies and suddenly moved to a man who used to be a fencer on his way to the olympics.
All of this would have been solved by reading the blurb up top. Admittedly – I didn’t and was quickly much more interested. Medieval magic meets modern knowledge stories have always fascinated me. This one kept me entertained all the way until the end. If I spill too many details it’ll end up being a spoiler filled review.
There’s a lot of research shoved into this book – and it shows. Both on types of items carried, ones that are effective with different weapons, ways to hold them – it’s clear the author either did research or is immersed in the field heavily.
I can say the conversations come across as a strong point. General narrative is a bit weaker. The story itself certainly contains magic which is always a draw. I loved the clash between modern and alternate world situations. The sucker punch from me forgetting what I was reading versus my first expectation shouldn’t earn a point but does.
In sum, if you’re interested in modern man in fantasy world – give this book a read.
I received a free copy of the book from the author in exchange for an honest review.
Dragon’s Trail by Joseph Malik
June 14, 2017 By completedreviews Leave a Comment
Dragon’s Trail by Joseph Malik
The Outworlders, Book One
Publisher: Oxblood Books
Genre: Sci-Fi/Fantasy
Length: Full Length (436 pgs)
Rating: 4.5 stars
Reviewed by Poinsettia
“I didn’t come here to sell my soul. I came here to buy it back.”
Once dubbed “The Deadliest Man Alive,” Jarrod Torrealday is a former Olympic saber hopeful and medieval weapons expert banned from competition for killing another fencer in a duel. He now scrapes by as a stuntman and technical consultant for low-budget fantasy films.
A young sorcerer from another world offers Jarrod the gig of a lifetime: adviser to the war council for a magical realm teetering on the edge of collapse, with a foreign army massing just beyond its borders.
Swept into a treacherous and deadly world of intrigue and conspiracy, Jarrod soon learns that the enemy mastermind is also from Earth, and has laid the foundations for a new kind of war.
Jarrod has nothing left to lose.
Jarrod’s life is in shambles. At the height of his career, he lost it all and has been in a tailspin ever since. When Crius, a sorcerer from another world, approaches Jarrod with the opportunity to be a hero again, he gladly accepts. Fortunately, Jarrod isn’t going alone. His good friend Carter, also an exceptionally skilled warrior, is invited as well. Together they have the power to turn the tide of war.
Jarrod and Carter adapt to the medievalesque world of Gateskeep very quickly. While they are well versed in the weaponry and armor of that type of civilization, I would think that knowing about it would be quite different from actually living it. They did have quite a bit to learn, but they acclimated to their new surroundings just a bit too easily for my taste.
Jarrod is a very likable character. He doesn’t tolerate bullies, and he never hesitates to stand up for those in need of his help. His fighting and weaponry skills are far beyond anything the people of Gateskeep have ever seen. While many are impressed with Jarrod’s skill, others seek to eliminate him immediately. In fact, Jarrod finds himself in so many fights that I began to wonder if he would even live to see the war. However, Jarrod wins practically every conflict he becomes tangled in. Ordinarily, I would say this is unrealistic, but Mr. Malik makes it seem completely plausible. As if his skill in combat weren’t enough, Jarrod also has the brains to back up his brawn. He has the ability to analyze his enemies and predict their next moves on the battlefield and off. As I read, I eagerly anticipated his confrontation with the sorcerer.
Perhaps the most striking thing about his novel is Mr. Malik’s attention to detail. Absolutely everything, the fights, weaponry, people, animals, weather, etc., is described meticulously making this strange new world feel very concrete and realistic. Consequently, I feel that this is not a book to race through. It is a book to savor and soak in all the details.
I highly recommend Dragon’s Trail. I thoroughly enjoyed following Jarrod and Carter’s adventures in Gateskeep, and I look forward to the next installment in the series. Fans of fantasy would do well to pick up a copy today.